I was a little leery of tackling the Tom Hackbarth story last week.   

Not because I didn’t think I had the story right; Hackbarth’s behavior was unseemly, as was that of those who piled on to add detail to the story based purely on innuendo and supposition.  

No, I was leery mostly because whenever the topic of Planned Parenthood or any sort of offense against women is concerned, there are not a few people out there who would toss rationality to the wind, if they ever had it in the first place.  

I don’t know Rachel Nygaard, and she damned sure doesn’t know me.  Can she approach this, or any, issue rationally?  Well, she writes for Minnesota Progressive Project, which isn’t a good sign.  But that’d be a smear by association, and judgment by innuendo, and that’s the sort of stuff I condemned in my original piece on the subject.  

Of which more later.  

For better or worse, Nygaard does capably summarize the core of the local Sorosphere’s meme on the subject:  

“I understand why the police and the security guard thought what they might have thought, but it really was insignificant to me.” – Representative Hackbarth  

Tracking down a woman you met once while carrying a gun is an insignificant act? Even if you remove the fact that he was carrying a gun, a man that felt the need to track a woman down when he felt she wasn’t being completely honest with him is stalking behavior  

And if you leave aside the facts that Hackbarth was accused of no crimes, that there is no evidence that the target of his misplaced interest ever knew Hackbarth was looking for her, and that  the gun is irrelevant (Hackbarth has a permit, and permit-holders are two orders of magnitude less likely to commit any kind of crime than non-permittees like, well, Rachel Nygaard, among others), she’s right.  Hackbarth, by his own admission, was at the very least exceptionally clingy; at worst…  

…well, we don’t know, because there was no “at worst”.   Hackbarth parked his car – near Planned Parenthood.  He got out and changed jackets; a security guard saw Hackbarth’s legal, holstered gun, and called the cops.  But for that chance encounter with a closed-circuit camera, we’d have likely have known nothing of the story…  

…and, Rachel Nygaard will no doubt remind you, Hackbarth could have gone on to shoot the woman in a fit of rage.   

Which is, really, all she has.  Could-haves.  

Could-haves and dogma, of course:  

The ‘boys will be boys’ dismissal of his actions by the conservative bloggers astounds me.  When is this type of behavior ever okay?    

This is the GOP blogger Mitch Berg commenting on the Hackbarth issue.

Remember – in the world of domestic law, including “abuse”, “domestic violence”, “stalking” and the like, men are considered guilty until proven innocent.  

Going on to say that

Everything Is Stalking

He later qualifies his more offending statements (not those listed above) but the misogynistic attitude seethes from his post. 

Go ahead and read the article.  It’s nonsense, of course; there is no “misogynistic attitude” – not in the sense that a rational person would understand.  The only “offense” would be to those who find any questioning of The Narrative offensive.  

I won’t say “Nygaard is lying”, because “lying” implies knowing that she’s spreading a falsehood; I think that to Nygaard’s perspective, which (I’m going to go out on a short limb and guess) comes from marinading in Big Feminist dogma for an entire adult lifetime, men are guilty of misogynism, stalking, abuse, or whatever until proven innocent – and furthermore they can never be proven innocent! 

Of course, to Big Feminism (and I think it’s fair to say Nygaard is acting as an agent of Big Feminism), defending a man against even the most facile, unsupported innuendo, by introducing fact into the discussion (or, in this case, pointing out the lack of facts behind the innuendo thrown at Hackbarth), is itself “anti-woman”.   

Clearly, Mitch Berg and Rep Hackbarth have a different moral compass than the rest of us. 

Clearly. 

I believe that the guilty should be punished – and that people are innocent until proven guilty, and that “proof” means a lot more than innuendo, narrartive, and ideology-based assumptions.  I believe in empirical, observable fact, not dogma.  I believe that people are individuals with their own motivations and backstories and strengths and weaknesses and the dignity (and degradation) that comes from the exercise of their own free will  – not facile cartoons that follow pre-written narratives.

 And it’d seem that Nygaard believes that I’m a cartoon.  She puts it in as many words:

I truly hope that they educate themselves about domestic abuse and difficulties protecting women, men and children from domestic assault. 

Dear Rachel Nygaard; keep your prejudices, your narratives, your bigotry off my body.  You don’t know me.  You have no idea where I’ve been and what I’ve done in my life (and I’m not going to tell you any of it here, anyway).  Just as your idiot friends rushed to judge Tom Hackbarth based (as I showed) entirely on narrative, screed and innuendo, so you’re doing with me.  

That’s OK – I can take care of myself just fine, and it’d seem to be all you are equipped to do anyway, and we should expect no more.  

As I said in my original post; stalking is wrong.  Clinginess is a bad idea.  Separation and divorce are a bitch, psychologically as well as every other way.  

All clear?

Good news: the FBI has arrested a Somali teen for attempting to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland Oregon.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out whether Mohammed Muhammed, the alleged bomber, is  an anti-tax terrorist, or a pro-second-amendment kind of terrorist, or pro-life terrorists, or one of the anti-gay-marriage kind of terrorists?

How does the President and Secretary Napolitano expect us to fight terror if they won’t tell us what kind of domestic terror was involved?

They warned me that if I voted Conservative, dissent would be viewed as treason.

And they were right; according to Whoopi, speaking out against intrusive searching is “an act of terrorism”:

Via Rob Port.

David Harsanyi notes that it’s not just the Who0per:

Not so long ago, the left positioned itself as the defender of innocents against the Bush administration’s war on terror, which was “just one tiny step away from fascism.” The Constitution was sacred, especially when we faced danger — and even more especially when a Republican was president.

It is a little galling that the left likely would have upheld accused terrorists’ Islamic scruples against full-body scanning…

It was not long ago that Democrats were regularly quoting Thomas Jefferson, who never actually said that “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” (Every nanny-state initiative in existence exempted, of course.)

Yet today, left-wing pundits, typified by syndicated liberal columnist Ruth Marcus, implore Americans to grow up, become better automatons, get moving and submit. The admired liberal columnist Michael Kinsley first offers us tales of TSA kindheartedness and then tells us the same.

Many left-wing publications that cautioned us against George W. Bush’s ham-fisted intrusions now defend Barack Obama’s ham-fisted intrusions.

Modern liberals.  I’m not saying they support authoritarian dictatorship.  But they are the kind of people any would-be dictator needs to have around to take control.

Some of my liberal readers have been asking what I think about the Tom Hackbarth story.

My response; I can’t think much, since there’s really not much story. KSTP-TV’s piece reads, pretty much in its entirely:

State Rep. Tom Hackbarth was carrying a pistol when he told St. Paul Police he was jealous and looking for his girlfriend.

Officers took the gun from him calling his behavior “borderline terroristic.”

We’ll come back to what the police said and, more importantly, did.

The House GOP leadership reacted quickly and, under the circumstances, appropriately, suspending Hackbarth from his slated committee chairmanship for the next sessoin pending some sort of resolution.

Now, predictably, the regional leftymedia is in full dudgeon over this story.  As is their wont, they are filling in the blanks with a whoooole lot of innuendo, supposition, and flat-out fantasy.

As PJ O’Rourke once said, “I’m not a liberal, so I’m not an expert at stuff I know nothing about”.   I’m not going to pretend to have answers.  Indeed, all I have are questions.

Everything Is Stalking:  The accusations against Hackbarth aren’t all that clear; he was accused of “stalking-like” behavior by the always-articulate Saint Paul Police Department.  No charges have been filed.

That last bit is rather vital; no charges have been filed.

Remember – in the world of domestic law, including “abuse”, “domestic violence”, “stalking” and the like, men are considered guilty until proven innocent.  If the police had had anything beyond suspicion, they’d have come up with something.

Was Hackbarth doing something inappropriate?  It’s possible.  Very, very possible.  Hackbarth is separated, after 25 years of marriage.  Being “separated” is an emotional Cuisinart set on “mangle”;  a lot of hitherto-buried emotions run very close to the surface; people do things that they’d never normally do in real life (and I’m pleading the Fifth Amendment at this point).

So what did Hackbarth do?  We don’t know; not at all, other than “not enough for the SPPD to charge him with anything at all“, but apparently enough to draw their interest.  We’ll come back to that, too.

That complete lack of known facts hasn’t stopped the regional leftyblog brain trust from jumping to conclusions like a bunch of synchronized Shamu clones at a rhetorical Sea World.

Conservatives – Guilty Until Proven Anything At All:  The City Pages’ Hart Van Denburg gets the “who, what (sort of), when, where, why and how”, in his piece on the incident – and still manages to squeedge in some innuendo to fill in the factual blanks:

Republican state Rep. Tom Hackbarth went looking for a date the other day in a Highland Park alley, with his Smith and Wesson .38 strapped to his waist.

Innuendo; as Ven Denburg himself notes elsewhere in his story, Hackbarth has a carry permit.  Connecting his “stalking” and carrying a gun is convenient, and connecting the two certainly fits the institutional left’s narrative about conservatives, shooters and social interactions.  But it’s an innuendo unsupported by any actual facts – like, say, arrests or charges or any indication of intent that’d link the two factoids.

Which takes us to innuendo number 2:

The Most Important Right Of All:  Van Denburg continued:

He chose an odd place to park his pickup truck, too: The Planned Parenthood clinic lot, where security cameras caught him on tape.

Saint Paul’s pro-abortion community has come to regard all of Ford Parkway as its private property.  While the building itself doesn’t jump out at you, once you do know what you’re looking for, it’s hard to escape the fact that there is more going on in the neighborhood than just a baby-disposal mill.  There are apartments, stores, the Highland Park library, houses…people all over the place.  Ford Parkway is not all about Planned Parenthood.

But you’d never know that from the leftymedia’s reaction.  Was “near the Planned Parenthood Clinic” an “odd” place to park, as Ven Denburg called it?  Or was it a place to park his pickup, that happened to be near Planned Parenthood?

A justifiably skittish guard at the Ford Parkway clinic called the cops to report an unidentified man carrying a gun on the property. No surprise there.

More innuendo.  “Justifiably” skittish?  Planned Parenthood’s “justifiable” skittishness has led to a “justifiable” suspension of large chunks of the First Amendment within eye-and-earshot of the clinics in Saint Paul and elsewhere around the country.  And now, apparently, the Second Amendment as well; being seen with a firearm that is legal and permitted under Minnesota law “justifies” Planned Parenthood’s rent-a-cops calling in the heat?

What other civil liberties does Planned Parenthood get to selectively excise?

Worse, naturally, are the “Feminist” bloggers.  “Red Sonya” from the always-incontinent Shakespeare’s Sister tries Hackbarth and finds him guilty based on…well, you guessed it, more innuendo:

Who the hell decides that, after meeting someone for coffee, you are immediately entitled—nay, obligated—to make sure that she’s not with another man?! Oh, stalkery entitled douchebags with unchecked privilege and no sense of boundaries who believe that women are their property and have no respect for their autonomy, that’s who!

Perhaps.

Or people (male and female – it swings both ways pretty equally) whose senses of boundaries are temporarily (one hopes) warped by their current circumstances.

Or both.  We don’t know – because “Red’s” take is based entirely on filling in the factual blanks with a whole lot of PC filler.

While stalking is frightening enough, the loaded gun makes this even scarier. Hackbarth does have a permit for concealed carry, so his actions weren’t illegal.

Buuuuuuut…

But since he began his controlling behavior immediately after meeting this woman, I’m skeptical of his ability to shrug off this event—and, from his twisted perspective, her “lie”—without having a douchetantrum of massive proportions.

What a wonderful world, where people can issue the binding diagnosis of “douchetantrumitis” (let me check the DSM-IV for that one) while knowing zero facts whatsoever.

When guys like this escalate, altercations easily become fatal with the addition of a loaded gun to the mix.

And they much more easily don’t.

Look – it goes without saying that stalking – or even just being excessively clingy after less than a whole lot of dates – is a bad thing.  And it doesn’t excuse any bad behavior to add “don’t discount the weirdness that comes with the whole emtional bumper-car ride that goes along with divorce, because everyone reacts differently, and most everyone does something that they’ll wind up regretting one way or another, whether it’s getting married to the first person you sleep with or blowing all your money on strippers maybe just having a real hard time getting used to the differing expectations people have in the dating world after being off the market for most of three decades”.   Readjusting to single life can be a real bitch.

[Side note to conservative grownups in the audience; watch some idiot leftyblogger take that last sentence and run a post entitled “Berg Excuses Stalking”, ignoring that bit at the front where I said “It doesn’t excuse bad behavior…”.  It’s pretty much inevitable – Ed.]

The Victorian Vapours:  Oh, yeah – Hackbarth had a gun.  After his run-in with the SPPD, it was confiscated.  And then, after all was said and done, he got it back.

But the presence of a firearm – especially in the hands of a conservative, anti-abortion Republican who is engaged in liberal innuendo-fodder – acts on leftybloggers and lefty journalists like a green-and-yellow cape does on a Vikings fan.

The normally sensible David Brauer left a comment in a Facebook thread:

[O]f course, it seems like creepy potentially violent stalking, but then again, these gun dudes carry their pieces around everywhere. it’s like their wallet. and of course, he was in scary, scary Highland. It’s no Cedar, Mn!

Well, doy.  It doesn’t do you any good if you don’t have it with you when you need it.

And check out the leftyblogs (rhetorically, mind you – don’t actually read then) for the number of references to the fact that the revolver was “fully loaded”.   Huh?  You’d carry an empty gun?  To what – butt-whip a robber?  Or a half-loaded one?  For what – impromptu games of Russian Roulette?

Grrr. I’m sorry.  Dumb people bug me.

Oh, yeah – let me reiterate; he got the gun back when the episode was over.  Which may not be any sort of testimony to Hackbarth’s alleged actions or state of mind, but it is a pretty good sign that he did nothing remotely illegal – and that’d be in an area of law where telling a woman that those pants do make her butt look bigger is fifth-degree domestic assault, a misdemeanor punishable by a year in jail and a $10K fine.

(The above sentence is intended as satire.  The first idiot leftyblogger – and I’ll stipulate that that isn’t entirely a redundant phrase – that tries to run that into “Berg advocates stalking and makes light of domestic violence” will both incur my disinterested wrath and be lying, anyway.  Just don’t go there).

Berg’s Seventh Law?:  Remember – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.  The leftymedia is romping and playing with the Hackbarth story because somewhere out there there is a video of a DFL legislator standing outside an elementary school in full S&M garb, bellowing expletives at a first-grade teacher that spurned his advances, waving a katana.

No, I can’t prove it.

Any more than any of the innuendoids above can prove any of their stuff.

But it’s a law, after all.

UPDATE: Welcome, “Developers are Crabgrass” readers.

Which is sort of like saying “hey, look at all the leptons”.  Both of them are at present largely hypothetical, abstruse constructs.

Oh, yeah – read my piece above.  Zaetsch is lying, as usual.  The guy wouldn’t know “factual” if “factual” spiked his Metamucil.  Read my actual post – something Zaetsch, or whomever sent him the link, clearly didn’t do – and decide for yourself.

Better yet, leave a comment and engage in the discussion.  If you’re used to the level of conversation over at all the blogs that are part of the “Stillwater Asylum” – “Lloydletta”, “The Dump”, “Crabgrass” and wherever Bremer is ranting and whatever pseudonym Weiner us using these days – you’ll find things are a whooooole lot more rational here; you have to bring some intellectual game, in a way you’re not used to .  Give it a shot!

Until maybe the mid-eighties, “terror target” and “Israel” were more or less synonymous – going back hundreds of years, reaching a peak over the past seventy years or so. 

In response, the State of Israel has become very punctilious about learning the who, what, where and why of terror.  It is a matter of individual and national survival, for a people that spent the middle of the Twentieth Century being shot, starved, gassed and burned nearly out of existence in what Helen Thomas called their homeland.

To Israelis, it’s serious business.

To Americans, it’s part ritual, and part make-work program.  We’ve been subjected to three serious terror attacks on our own soil.  One, the first World Trade Center bombing, failed due to its conspirators’ incompetence and, I’d like to think, the providence of a merciful God.  One – Oklahoma City – was the work of a pair of solitary madmen, or so says our government. And of course, September 11. 

Other attacks – the shoe-bomber, the underwear bomber – failed due to incompetence, possibly caused by the part of countererrorism we do well; going overseas and finding the professionals and killing them, forcing terrorists to go with the red-shirt squad for going after the US.  Still others – Fort Hood, the murder in Little Rock – were relatively (!) small-scale, apparently-spontaneous outbursts. 

We’ve been able to afford to skate on “airport security” that exists more to serve as a bureaucratic feel-good – like “Zero Tolerance” policies – while conforming to current fashions in political correctness – because a generation of terrorist A-squads were killed in Iraq, are laying low and watching the sky in Pakistan or Afghanistan, are holed up in the jungles of Indonesia and the Philippines listening for out-of-place twig snaps, or are sitting in Guantanamo fielding residual offers from Oliver Stone.

There’ll be more.  There always are.   And this past month’s uproar over the Transportation Security Administration’s intrusive-yet-useless groping of random Americans has prompted the conscientious to ask “how do countries with real commitments to keeping travel safe do it?

Jeff Dunetz, er, profiles security, Israeli-style.

I’ll start with the conclusion:

As the United States defends against the ever expanding threat of Muslim terror, right here on our home turf, success depends on throwing off the shackles of political correctness and adopting the methods of our ally Israel.

However the US is stuck in what seems to be an irreversible and deadly policy of treating everyone the same., even though we are all individuals and very different. The ultimate result is an airport security process that gives you a choice of being abused by a machine or the groping hands of an untrained TSA agent. The present TSA policies put passengers and the X-Ray appliances that reveal their bare bodies in the same category as they are both treated like machines.

During her 62 year fight against terror, Israel has achieved a balance between protection of civil liberties and the prevention of violence. Her decision was that the sanctity of saving human lives and preserving personal dignity, outweighs the targeting and possible inconvenience of the extra questioning of a few.

One key difference?  The goal of Israeli security is very different than that of the TSA’s inspection:

The real difference between the Israeli and American approach is the target. Israel tries to identify and stop the terrorist while the U.S. targets the bomb or other weapon. This approach does not change whether there is a left or right wing Prime Minister in power because the government realizes for Israel, the fight against terrorism is a fight for its very survival. Thus her government and citizenry have a view of preventing terrorism that is unencumbered by the political correctness which restrains efforts in the United States.

The ISA (Israeli Security Agency) calls it “human factor.” Some part of that human factor would cause Al Sharpton to show up to picket the Airport if it was practiced in the US. Ethnic profiling of passengers plays a central role in Israel’s multi-level approach. Not just ethnicity is profile, race religion, general appearance and behavior are also part of the information used to profile. And wherever that profile is being made, no matter what country it is being made in, it is an Israeli doing the profile.

While this past month of public, crowd-sources scrutiny has uncovered numerous stories of TSA incompetence and depravity, I’ll resist the urge to jump on the bandwagon of calling TSA staffers universal incompetents because they are low-wage government employees with little, and indifferent training.  I know a few TSA people, and know them to be genuinely concerned with security.

I also know a few people who are genuinely interested in first aid; I wouldn’t let them take out my kids’ appendixes:

There are other differences, most importantly is that you don’t just come off the street and get a job with the ISA (Israel Security Agency). These security agents are all ex-military (as most of the country is) and they are selected based on their intelligence and their ability to behavior profile.

Read the whole thing; it includes excellent insights on Israeli “profiling” and the techniques they use.

And remember it the next time you “fly”.

Part of me hopes that a kid in Saint Paul tries to ride his or her bike to school…

…and duly gets told by his or her teacher, principal or school board not to bring flags to school at risk of alienating the school’s America-Hating-American population…

…so we can see something like this:

…and then see Ann Carroll, John Brodrick and Ellona Street-Stewart’s heads explode.

Figuratively.

A guy can dream.

Humans profile.  Every last one of us.

Don’t believe me?

If you’re a middle-class black American, and you see a bunch of people who scream “Latino gang-banger” up ahead, do you modify your behavior?

If you’re an openly gay American, and you see a group of guys in mullets mulling about showing signs of obvious angry intoxication up ahead, do you find an alternate route?

If you’re a couple of NPR listeners, in your alpaca and tweed and too-perfectly-gray hair, and a bunch of Hells Angels walk into the gas station as you’re looking for an air freshener for your Prius, do you get out of the way?

You all do, of course.  Because while none of you may like to discriminate against other human beings, our self-preservation reflex recognizes threats.  It’s human nature.

And when you get on a plane?  Yep – young men who look middle eastern rate a second glance.  Maybe more.  It’s because humans are hardwired to try not to get killed.

I do it.  You do it, no matter what kind of mewling liberal PCBot you think you are. And Juan Williams did it – and made the mistake of offending his holier-than-thou masters at NPR.

Yesterday NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims.

This is not a bigoted statement. It is a statement of my feelings, my fears after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by radical Muslims. In a debate with Bill O’Reilly I revealed my fears to set up the case for not making rash judgments about people of any faith. I pointed out that the Atlanta Olympic bomber —  as well as Timothy McVeigh and the people who protest against gay rights at military funerals — are Christians but we journalists don’t identify them by their religion.

To be fair, both belong/ed to sects of Christianity just a little relatively far out on the fringe than Wahabbism.

But here’s the important part:

And I made it clear that all Americans have to be careful not to let fears lead to the violation of anyone’s constitutional rights, be it to build a mosque, carry the Koran or drive a New York cab without the fear of having your throat slashed. Bill and I argued after I said he has to take care in the way he talks about the 9/11 attacks so as not to provoke bigotry.

Which is something most Americans of all creeds believe.  The US is still the best place on earth to be a Muslim.

National Public Radio seems to see itself as a benign national thought police.

Maybe it should fund itself…

There’s nothing a tyrant hates worse than an apostate.

When the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – a radical fascist and anti-semite who hob-nobbed with Hitler and rooted for the Final Solution – first started agitating against Jewish immigration to “Palestine” before World War 2, he turned his goons loose on…

…moderate Arabs.  Not the Jews.  Because like tinpot tyrants the world over, the Grand Mufti knew that while virtually none of his people were going to convert to Judaism, plenty would be perfectly happy to seek accomodation with them; radicalism had to be made safer than peace, to keep his base in line behind him.

And tyrants, petty and otherwise, the world over have repeated the pattern; Lenin killed the Socialists and Mensheviks to consolidate his power before going after the Czarists.  Franco killed the moderates and accomodationists, as did his communist opponents.

I’m not going to say that the DFL and its friends at the various PACs – Alliance for a Better Minnesota and so on – are in that league.  Perish the thought.

Over the past week or two, the regional and, now, national left have been in high dudgeon over Target’s donation of $150,000 to MNForward, a political action committee that seeks to send gays to re-orientation camps in Colorado.

{scrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatch}

Wait.  That can’t be right.  Let me look…

Whew.  OK, I had that wrong.  MNForward is a pro business PAC.

But you’d never know it from the left’s response to Target’s donation of $150,000 to MNForward, a Political Action Committee whose entire focus is on business, and the notion that a DFL governor would be a disaster for Minnesota businesses already suffering from a lagging economy and among the highest corporate taxes in the nation.

Of course, Target is far from the only company giving money to MNForward.  Best Buy and Hubbard Broadcasting (both former employers of mine), Polaris, Davisco, Red Wing Shoes, Regis (whose founder, Myron Kunin, gave $5K to “Win Minnesota”, which is the money-laundering cutoff for “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”), Securian, Pentair, Federated Insurance, the Insurance Federation of Minnesota, and Cold Spring Granite have so far ponied up something around $900,000, which is a few bucks more than the Daytons and Alida Messinger have contributed all by themselves, and less than half than what they, their plutocrat cronies, and their union supporters have given to A4aBM and “Win Minnesota” alone, so far in this race (and sources tell me A4aBM will eventually spend ten million, mostly in Dayton and union money, this cycle).  That’s less than a quarter of what Matt Entenza has spent so far, most of it attacking Emmer.

Of course, Hubbard Broadcasting is the #4 TV station in a four station market; they’re so desperate for ratings, they’ve begun experimenting with the radical notion of not appearing relentlessly left-of-center – the experiment is only partial, and the jury is still out.  Polaris and RedWing pretty much serve blue-collar clienteles; you don’t find a lot of urban “progressives” on snowmobiles or wearing steel-t0ed work boots.  Most people have no idea food processor Davisco exists, but they’re rural and thus off the radar for the urban progressives.  And most people can get a vague idea from their titles what Securian, Federated, Cold Spring and IFM do – but none of them are linked with “progressive” ideas or, to most people, any ideas at all.  (I know what Pentair does, but the odds are pretty good you don’t…)

But Target, and to a lesser extent Best Buy?  In addition to immense charitable giving to a very eclectic array of community groups and schools (Target in Minnesota’s leading corporate charitable donor, and their money helps support dozens of public, charter and alternative schools), both led the way on “diversity” in the Twin Cities.  They are widely regarded as “progressive’ companies, and both have long put their money where their corporate mouths were when it came to acting “progressive”.  Both actively worked to support GLBT employees; I knew not a few gay managers at Best Buy, and their orientation seemed not to harm their careers in the least; I’ve never worked for Target, but friends who have tell me it’s at the very least the same.  And that’s a good thing – because both companies led the way in recognizing that a person’s orientation has nothing to do with his or her productivity, talent or merit.

So what happens when a “progressive” company donates to a candidate that dissents from the economic policies of the party that has tried to seize the word “progressive?”

They’re seen as apostates – “traitors”.  And Big Progressive – that combination of Big DFL, Big Labor, Big Gay, Big Open Border, Big Academia and so forth – know that they must destroy apostates.

So A4aBM and its cronies in the “Human Rights Coalition” – a Big Gay group – have spent the past week painting Target, that most progressive of companies in that most progressive of places, Minneapolis – as “anti-gay”.  Because of a contribution to help Minnesota’s business climate, supporting a candidate who Big Progressive wants – needs – to paint as “anti-gay”.

(Is Emmer “anti-gay”?  He’s been on record supporting traditional marriage amendments; he’s also said on the Northern Alliance that it’s really a side issue for the governor – as it in fact is.  Is supporting traditional marriage “hate”?  Is it “rabidly anti-gay”, as a gay co-worker of mind called it?  I think it devalues the term “hate”, but as PJ O’Rourke said, I’m not a liberal, so I’m not an expert at stuff I know nothing about…)

And so Target and Best Buy, the “apostate” “progressives”, must be destroyed, while the Polarises and the Hubbards and the Securians and Pentairs get left alone; no “progressive” is ever going to start doubting the mother faith because a snowmobile manufacturer or a rural food processor or a granite company supports Tom Emmer.

But “progressive” Target and Best Buy?  That’s a threat.

And so the thoughtcrime must be punished.

Two weeks ago over on True North, Jeff Peil – who works at my radio station, AM1280 – wrote an article that cast a gimlet eye on “Girl’s State”, an annual mock government exercise sponsored (along with “Boys State” – perhaps two of the last non-coed educational exercises in America) by the American Legion and its Auxiliary.

Peil had gotten an email from a parent who was unimpressed by one of the products of the exercise:

 An irate parent forwarded me a handout his 16-year-old daughter received this past weekend at a “Girls State” retreat sponsored by the American Legion Auxiliary.

Juniors in high school are invited to attend these Girls State retreats…While most of this seems relatively non-controversial, this year’s Girls State has ruffled a lot of feathers.  This year it was held at Bethel College from Sunday, June 13th – Saturday, June 19th.  During the course of the week, the daughter of my “irate” friend sent his father several emails decrying how left-wing the event was.  The father dismissed these, thinking he had simply trained his daughter well how to identify leftist propaganda.  Little did he realize that his daughter would come home with written proof of the left-wing agenda the group promotes.

Here is an exerpt – read Peil’s piece for the entire list:

Rules for Girls State – 2010

1. Never do housework.  No man ever made love to a woman because the house was spotless.

2. Don’t imagine you can change a man – unless he’s in diapers.

3. What do you do if your boyfriend walks out? You shut the door.

And more, in the same post-Sex-in-the-City vein.

Peil:

Now while something like this might be relatively non-controversial for women looking to boost their self-esteem and feminine comraderie, this was not a group of women.  This was a group of 16-year-old girls.  More importantly, these girls often attend this to have a resume padder for college applications.  The highly selective event offers young women an exposure to civics that not every high school girl gets, and thus makes the applicant stand out.  I ask you – what does this have to do with civics?

With all due respect to my colleague Peil – without whose talents as a salesman the Northern Alliance would not be on the air – I wonder if he’s watched Congress, or even most of the advertisements coming from Madison Avenue, lately?

No, there’s more to it than that.

———-

It was about thirty years ago last week that I and about a dozen other guys from Jamestown trekked off to Fargo on a Sunday to take part in Boy’s State.  Of the dozen from Jamestown, I think I was picked last – everyone above me had other plans.  So I squeaked in.

It was…different.  The presenting reason was about civics, of course – but I couldn’t help but thinking that the American Legion had an underlying motive; show us a little of the military life, too.    We were organized into eight “Counties”, which were about platoon-sized (and split into a couple of squad-sized “cities”), and led by a “counselor” who happened also to be an NDSU ROTC candidate.  These “counties” marched around in double file; we woke to reveille every morning, were shown how to make hospital corners on our dorm beds, had our rooms inspected by a couple of humorless highway patrolmen; minor transgressions rated pushups or minor hazing; being caught with “contraband” – booze, usually, although the list included drugs, porn and smokes – meant being sent immediately home to face the wrath of the local Legion chapter that had, we were reminded, paid our way (which, in a small town, was powerful deterrent; I think I heard of one kid being tossed).   We assembled at night for “taps” and to retire the colors, and had “lights out” at 10:30PM.

It was a whirlwind of activity; we divided up into two parties, the “Federalists” and “Nationalists”, by luck of the draw; I was a Fed.  We held a county caucus (mandatory) right after dinner Sunday.  I spoke; apparently that was all it took to get elected County party chair, which sent me to a 10PM meeting with the other seven chairs; they apparently liked my style, because by the end of my first evening I was the Chairman of the North Dakota Federalist Party.

Score.

The best part?  I would get to spend my first couple of days exempt from marching around with my platoon county.  I had early – 7AM – meetings every day with other party people; I had to get going early, and I’d gotten half an hours’ work done by the time the rest of my platoon county had gotten to breakfast.

But I also had to run the State Convention the next day.  It involved four hours of standing at a podium trying to conquer Robert’s Rules of Order on the fly.  And after that?  An all-night session of writing a party platform and designing a campaign for the state executive office races…

…the next day. 

Now, it’ll come as little surprise that I wrote most of the platform.  It SHOULD surprise you that it was so far to the left it would have made Paul Wellstone blanche with horror.  And boy, was I cynical; much of the platform was blatant pandering.  It was so far to the left that my “enemy”, the Nationalist Party chair, when he came to my college four years later to recruit for the Campus Republicans, recognized me and asked “so are you still super-liberal?”  I was a conservative by this point.

But between that and the campaign I designed – featuring a REALLY tight stage production that, yes, did in fact reflect my training in broadcast production values – we did in fact win the governor’s office and nine of the twelve executive offices. 

I went on to win an election to the Legislature, and then House Minority leader – all by Wednesday of that busy, crazy week.

And the House met for several sessions.  And by about Friday of that week of waking up at 6AM and going to sleep maybe at midnight (good behavior got us some later “lights outs”), some of the debate got a little blue, by PG-rated North Dakota 1980’s standards.

Friday afternooon,  someone – a Nationalist, naturally – introduced a resolution calling for the legalization of prostitution in Pisek, North Dakota, in the interest of helping spur economic activity in the depressed little city. 

It got debated for close to two hours, and I recall – and then got sent back from the Senate, before going (as I recall) on to get vetoed by the governor; the override survived. 

It was by far the most-debated bill in the session.  It was probably something none of us told our parents or our Legion sponsors about.   It was, of course, the inevitable result of putting a couple of hundred seventeen-year-old boys, punchy from long days and unfamiliar places and lousy food and constant immersion among strangers and strange jobs and strange rituals, into a room together.

And it was probably the most thorough education in how a bicameral legislature works that any of us have ever had.

———-

One of the Girls’ Staters posted a link to Peil’s article on a Facebook page, and True North got some feedback.

When I read the initial article, I was a little nervous; had the American Legion Auxiliary knuckled under to political correctness?

Emily Schirvar of Stillwater emailed to say not to worry:

In the first place, to accuse the Girls State as upholding “leftist” values is nothing short of ridiculous. As an attendee this year, I can attest that the American Legion Auxiliary’s focus tended more towards the right; I am proud to say, however, that the values we learned there were above and beyond party lines. We learned, among other things, to respect our nation’s flag as a sign of national unity and pride–ignoring our own biases to demonstrate an interest in and vision for the country we all share.

Well, that hasn’t changed…

Additionally, the “proof” mentioned in Peil’s blog is nothing more than misplaced evidence: these “rules” were meant to be a type of comic relief. With very full days, beginning at 7 a.m. and continuing as late as 10:30 p.m., laughs were a way to wind down, and relax for a moment; it would be ridiculous to attach ulterior motives.

And the “rules?”

Had the “irate” daughter been paying attention at the assemblies, she would have realized that not only were the “rules” designed as jokes–not to be taken seriously–but the other rule “verbally read by the group administrator” was not meant to be included at all. Receiving the list from a friend, the administrator simply forgot to proofread. Her embarrassment was sufficient, in my opinion, to forgive that mistake–one that the group rectified by not including it in the Moccasin.

Another participant, who asked not to be identified, supported this:

The list was passed on to our administrator from a friend and she didn’t proof-read the list before hand. The administrator apologized profusely and was quite embarasssed. This is why the “rule” did not make it into the list, the administrator in no way wanted that to be advertised by Girls State or the American Legion.

It is unfortunate that the young woman missed out on one of the most important lessons of Girls State: that our actions have consequences, good or bad, and in order to change the world, we must first arm ourselves with knowledge. Perhaps, had she considered this, she would have had a better experience at Girls State.

Another participant – let’s call her “Participant B” – added:

The girls were not given an option as to which party they belonged to, which provided new insight to those who were in a party that may not have shared the same views as them. Never did the Girls State program endorse one party or promote a certain party’s point of view. The guest speakers’ political views varied. In fact, one guest said she was so right-wing, “she made Rush Limbaugh look liberal.”

As far as the “Rules for Girls State” go, I cannot understand how any of those jokes could be considered part of the “left-wing agenda.” You would be hard-pressed to find a Democrat who believes we should build malls on the moon or that a man’s mind is “too little to be let out alone.” I ask YOU, Jeff Piel: What do any of those “rules” (which are nothing more than jokes) have to do with a left-wing agenda?

Well, there  is a certain amount of anti-male baggage with the part of feminism that’s tied itself to the left in America – and if our nation’s high school juniors are unaware of this, it’s either very good news or very bad news – but I suspect that if the American Legion Auxiliary ever becomes a hotbed of this train of thought, our nation will have much bigger problems to deal with.

 Schirvar challenges bloggers:

…I have heard about the “evils” of bloggers who neglect to do their fair share of research before acting as “experts” on a topic. It is disappointing, then, to find such a clear example of this occurrence. Although no one asks bloggers to be completely without slant, it would have been more honorable had Peil at least tried to find out about the other side of the story. Far from “leftist propaganda”, as he calls it, the week-long event was an intensive look into how government works–at times the Girls State citizens were asked to put aside their prejudices for the sake of the experiment, and many (myself included) would say that this unique look into new ideas helped each one of us grow as individuals.

 “Participant B”:

I’m sad to disappoint you, Jeff Piel, but the American Legion’s Girls State 2010 was entirely non-partisan and completely worthwhile.

On the one hand, it’s not the biggest controversy True North has gotten into.  On the other hand, the generation that’s going to be taking things over in thirty years or so is kinda vital.

Thanks for all the response!

Keep chanting it to yourself:  “Conservatives are violent; conservatives are violent; conservatives are violent; conservatives are violent; conservatives are violent; conservatives are violent”.

Just keep on chanting.

I read this, and wondered for a brief moment if the story didn’t have some garbled copy – if it wasn’t talking about Afghanistan, or southern Mexico, or the Congo or something.

No such luck (I’m adding emphasis):

An area in south-central Arizona that was once a haven for family hiking and off-roading, now has signs warning of drug smugglers and human traffickers.

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu says that his department no longer has control over parts of his county.

At a recent press conference, Sheriff Babeu said, “We are outgunned, we are out manned and we don’t have the resources here locally to fight this.”

It is, in effect, an insurgency on American soil, on behalf of a foreign power (albeit not a soverign government – at least, not directly):

Last month, Pinal County Deputy Sheriff Louie Puroll was ambushed and shot as he tracked six drug smugglers. Sheriff Babeu said the ambush mirrored military tactics.

But for God’s sake, don’t ask peoples’ immigration status!

In regards to Obama’s promise of 1,200 National Guardsmen spread out from San Diego to the mouth of the Rio Grande, Babeu added, “It will fall short. What is truly needed in 3,000 soldiers for Arizona alone.”

OK, open borders people;  this is the wages of your lunacy.  This is the big reward for casting away our national sovereignty; losing control of our nation, not just fiscally and politically and economically, but in terms of actually controlling this country so that it is safe for law-abiding Americans.

 Question for all of you who call Michele Bachmann and the Tea Partiers “seditious” for advocating limiting the power of government – are the Open Borders, anti-sovereignty people not even more, more directly seditious, since their policies lead directly to the loss of government control over the nation is is charged in our Constitution with defending?

A North Dakota bike tour M bars a Minnesotan for objecting to a community prayer…

…over, and over, and over, and over…

Morgan Christian, 54, of St. Paul, rode the 500-mile CANDISC [“Cycling around North Dakota in Sakakawea Country”] tour three consecutive years. He objected last summer to a prayer said before a meal at a public high school gym in Turtle Lake, one of several host communities along the route.

Christian expressed his objections to the minister and ride director and in subsequent e-mails to the State Parks and Recreation Department. He said he expected an apology but instead received a letter from the bike tour committee telling him he wasn’t welcome back.

I’ll just bet he “expressed” his objections…

“If I don’t say something, who am I?” Christian said. “I’m going to be the guy who stands up and says there are people who don’t think this is wonderful. It is an imposition. There could be a moment of silence, or at least a warning that prayer is going to be said.”

But instead you chose to be the self-glorifying narcissist who has to make your worldview the focus of attention.  You chose to whiz in your host’s wheaties.

North Dakota Parks and Recreation Director Mark Zimmerman said Christian’s attitude was the issue, not his religious beliefs. Ride director Hillary Nelson said Christian disrespected the ride and the town.

“This was Turtle Lake’s way of representing their community,” she said. “If he didn’t like what was going on, he could have left.”

What?  Quietly?  What are you,crazy?

Christian said he was just standing up for himself.

“I don’t think I raised my voice all that much. Whether I appeared agitated, I don’t know,”

Read:  He was a howling, screaming little prick.

he said, adding that he has contacted the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom from Religion Foundation about the issue.

And that’ll be the end of the CANDISK ride.

Thanks, Morgan. It’s all about you.

Just so we’re clear on things – this blog is an unabashed supporter of Israel.  I say this as a firmly committed goy.

That is not to say Israel is perfect; it is to say that the Jewish State has extended itself in the interest of peace, over and over again, and gotten slapped for it by the “international community” every time. 

Yoram Dori – an advisor to Shimon Peres – responds to Helen “Send ’em back to Warsaw” Thomas by noting that his parents, like so many Israelis, come to Israel from those countries for very good reason; his father and mother were the only survivors of their families from Austria and Poland, respectively.  Over two out of three German Jews died during World War II; nine out of ten Polish Jews died as well.

That is why they went to Israel in the first place; because the only parts of the “international community” that didn’t let them down during the war were the parts that were actively hoping for their deaths.  Just like today.

IN THE 62 years of our existence, we have had seven wars, thousands of terror attacks, buses which have exploded in streets, firing into schools, mortars fired on kindergartens. Yet you wish to exile us back to the inferno, as if nothing happened 65 years ago in Europe, as if our hands have not been stretched out for peace since the establishment of the state?

We were victorious in the wars imposed upon us by Egypt and we signed a peace agreement with it after yielding all the territory and all the oil. We signed a peace agreement with Jordan. We yielded all the territory and much water. We withdrew from Lebanon to the international border and, in return, we received Hizbullah katyushas on our citizens. We left Gaza and in return, we received massive firing on our citizens in the South. Are you aware, Ms. Thomas, that many children from Sderot and the area around Gaza wet their beds until a late age out of fear of the Hamas missiles? And it is us that you wish to exile? Why? Because you think that we are weak or because it annoys you that we are not defeated?

Lest you think Dori is a fire breathing Tea Matzo Partier…:

As someone, who throughout his adult life has been a member of the Israeli “peace camp,” notwithstanding you and your strange and angering views, my friends and I (and I hope also my government) will continue to turn over every stone and scour every corner to attain peace.

Would that it could be.

Thomas is only the most public, risible example of her kind.

Last year on Marty Owings’ “Radio Free Nation”, I got a chance to ask Representative Keith Ellison if he, in his capacity as the first Muslim in Congress and one of the most powerful people in the Islamic world, repudiated the Hamas charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel and the extinction of the Jews.

His response:  “How many Palestinians do you know?”

Y’see, I was the bad guy for asking.

Bill Maher  wants Obama to be a “Real Black” President:

Bill Maher: “I thought when we elected a black president, we were going to get a black president. You know, this [BP oil spill] is where I want a real black president. I want him in a meeting with the BP CEOs, you know, where he lifts up his shirt so you can see the gun in his pants. That’s — (in black man voice) ‘we’ve got a motherfu**ing problem here?’ Shoot somebody in the foot.”

Shall we chalk this up to racism?

Or maybe he was just falling-over drunk, like a “real Irish” comic?

I used to be a Big-L Libertarian.  I left the GOP, disgusted that they’d sold the law-abiding gun owner down the river with the 1994 “Crime” Bill.  I joined the Libertarians because they were purists on liberty.

And in a room full of purists, it was easy to explain why believing in private property rights – a cornerstone of Libertarianism and, also, the United States – and the right to free association meant it was wrong to tell, say, a lunch counter owner that he had to desegregate his private property.  The proper response – in a room full of liberties purists who, as a general rule, are less racist than the population at large – is to not go to that lunch counter, and use your freedom of speech to let other people know that the owner ran a segregated lunch counter.

Of course, we rarely had to try to explain these things to people outside the room.  The Libertarians never won any elections – rarely got over a percent, in fact.

Ron Paul started changing that; he brought liberty-minded people into the GOP, and in some places took it over.

The Tea Party furthered this, sanding off (thankfully) some of Paul’s whackdoodle conspiracymongering and focusing on libertarian ideas of taxation, spending and the role of government – a discussion this nation desperately needs.

Rand Paul, running for the Senate in Kentucky, just got into trouble for getting into an argument about classical libertarianism in a forum that’s more concerned with squeedging attack sound bites out of people with elephants next to their names.

Howard Kurtz on the original interview that started the flap:

[Rand Paul] kept telling [MSNBC host Rachel] Maddow he was not in favor of discrimination. He would have marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He supported the law’s ban on bias in public institutions. “Am I a bad person? Do I believe in awful things? No,” Paul said.

But he would not, despite repeated prodding, say the government should legally bar private institutions from discrimination.

And in doing so, he was that one thing politicians all claim to be, but almost none are;  honest.  He’s not a racist – indeed, to principled conservatives racism (imposing group stereotypes onto individuals) is an absolute wrong; to a Libertarian the thoughts in ones’ heart, the things one says, and the company one keeps are none of the government’s business – but everyone must be rigidly equal before the law:

“I’m all in favor of and that was desegregating the schools, desegregating public transportation, use public roads and public monopolies, desegregating public water fountains,” he said.

Which is a hunkydory discussion point among libertarians and Jeffersonian liberals; to them (us?), government has no place telling people they must not offend with their speech, their associations, or the use of their private property.  Among libertarians (big and small), at least as an academic discussion, allowing racists their constitutional rights to speak, associate and use their property as they wish does not in turn make one a racist – merely one who knows what government’s role is supposed to be, and the proper response to loathsome private beliefs, speech and behavior is evangelism and good speech.  It’s one of those poli-sci discussions that big-L Libertarians love to have, in the abstract.

But in politics, abstract questions have many layers of real manifestations:

“How about desegregating lunch counters?” Maddow said.

Mark Tapscott in the WashEx writes about the dim-witted feeding frenzy that ensued:

If the bloody waters that appear in the midst of such a shark frenzy make you uncomfortable, better get used to it. Odds are good that Paul is only the first of many Tea Party linked candidates whose inexperience in political combat with the media will spark such bloodbaths in coming months.

No such flap enveloped Scott Brown in Massachusetts probably because he had some prior experience as a Republican state senator in dealing with a hostile media in Massachusetts.

But many more of the Tea Party endorsed candidates who will gain visibility in the congressional campaign in coming months will, like Paul, be making their first-ever foray in seeking elective office. Like babes, they will go into brutal hand-to-hand combat with Establishment GOP, then Democratic opponents and their sympathetic journos, all of whom are seasoned veterans.

And when it comes to trying to frame your opponent, truth comes in a distant third to “making up a good chanting point to cleverly defame your opponent” and “making that chanting point so simple that any drooling SEIU droog can remember it”, in the hopes of taking a brief soundbyte of a statement intended as part of an academic discussion, and turning it first into “Rand Paul hates civil rights”, and thence to “Republicans are racists!”.

It’s poison for rational debate – but then, that’s not what the left, scared out of their minds by being on the wrong side of a populist tsunami, cares about.

The left is, of course, deeply hypocritical on the subject; via the ACLU, they are scrupulous about some peoples’  rights to speak and associate without question; somehow, the media managed to square the ACLU’s support for Nazis marching in Skokie with the idea that it didn’t mean the Democratic party sympathized with eliminationist anti-semites.   The rights of conservative college students, of course, don’t rate similar scrupulousness.

The lesson is a simple one, though.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know a couple of key truths for new politicians to remember when campaigning:

1. The media is in the bag for the Democrats.  Duh.
2. The media will cover for the “nuances” in the Dems’ positions; Rep. Keith Ellison, for example, will no more be grilled over whether his support for Hamas means he indirectly supports the extinction of Israel than Obama would be for his “bitter gun-clinging Jesus freaks” quote.
3. But they will find the energy to go over everything you say and do to find something that can be presented to the undecided to caricature you and frame you as part of the meme they are complicit in circulating about conservatives.
4. The left, believing as they do as a matter of historical, philosophical fact that “the ends justify the means, don’t care that they toss the entire context of what you say, and in effect lie about and defame you.  As long as it frames you so they win.

In ordinary times, by the way, this would be the point where I”d say “by the way, I oppose discrimination, and think Rand Paul was an idiot to try to get all academic on “nationa” TV on a subject as loaded as discrimination”.   But that doesn’t seem to be enough to keep the smear machine at bay, these days.

Next time you’re standing barefoot in the TSA line getting a rectal probe and watching them toss your toothpaste and shampoo, just remember – the system sort of barely works, if everything goes right and everyone is lucky as hell:

The Obama administration played down the fact that Shahzad, a U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, made it aboard the plane. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wouldn’t talk about it, other than to say Customs officials prevented the plane from taking off. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the security system has fallback procedures in place for times like this, and they worked.

And Attorney General Eric Holder said he “was never in any fear that we were in danger of losing him.”

But it seemed clear the airline either never saw or ignored key information that would kept Shahzad off the plane, a fact that dampened what was otherwise hailed as a fast, successful law enforcement operation.

I’m going to start a website where people can find when Dutch documentary filmmakers are travelling, and on which flight.

But thank heavens for small favors; Secretary Napolitano didn’t order her investigators to drop the search for Taliban sympathizers to focus on the NRA.

I’ve never cared much for Michael Savage.

And so I’ve never gotten one of his “liberalism is a mental disorder” T-shirts.

But the left seems to want so badly to presume that the right in America – especially the obstreporous, color-outside-the-lines right that’s making so much hay these days – represents some sort of depravity that I think some sort of diagnosis – clinical Narcissism? – might just apply.

Back as far as 9/12 (or maybe 9/13) I remember liberals chanting “the real danger is still home-grown militias”.  And every time there’s an incident these days, that wistful hope – that their fellow Americans are really a bunch of murderout animals – comes back to the front.

Over the weekend, before the arrest of the TImes Square bomber, we had Mayor Bloomberg   fairly hyperventilating at the possibility that the suspect would turn out to be a tea partier – a representative of a moment that has never had so much as a face slap attributed to it:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg appeared on Katie Couric’s show Monday night to discuss the attempted car bombing in Times Square. Between reassuring viewers at home that New York was safe and praising the city’s resilient spirit, Bloomberg wondered aloud if the culprit behind the Times Square car bomb was “a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health-care bill or something.”

Hizzoners’s wishful thinking was brutally let down when t Faisal Shahzad didn’t turn out to be a Tea Partier at all.

So intense is the left’s lust for this blood libel that left publications from The Nation to  the Daily Kos to tony leftybloggers to wannabee journalists citing “anonymous sources” that just knew that every liberals fantasy was going to come true, the left, fresh off of eight years of demanding that the right stop its (nonexistent) threats to their patriotism, seems to have developed an affirmative need to slander half of this nation.

So when are that tiny film of responsible liberals going to demand better of your leaders?

I can’t honestly say I have a coherent, consistent opinion about Arizona’s immigration law yet.

On the one hand, there can be no more repugnant thought to a citizen of a free society than the idea of police wandering around going “your papers, please?”. 

On the other hand, that’s not what the Arizona law is about.  According to actual lawyer Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci, who actually has some background in Arizona law, and who noted in my comment section yesterday:

Reasonable suspicion, I think, pertains to searches after an arrest has been effected. The example here being: a cop pulls a guy over for speeding and when the perp opens the car door window, pot smoke billows out. The cop then has reasonable suspicion that there may be pot in the car and can search it without a warrant.

That distinction (if I’m correct) is key to the critical language in the blurb you quote from 11-1051, “Lawful contact”. That term is not defined in Arizona Revised Statutes. However, given the context, I think it may mean a search or arrest pursuant to probable cause. Meaning that the mandate for cops to make a “reasonable effort” to ascertain a person’s immigration status (based on a “reasonable suspicion” of illegality) only kicks in if the person is stopped or arrsted for the violation of some other law.

That said, if I’m wrong and “lawful contact” means merely a cop ambling up to some browish dude with an accent and saying “hey, how ya’ doin’? Papers please,” then this law is repulsive, and proably unconstitutional.

If my interpretation is correct, then a lot of people are getting their panties in a wad over nothing.

To the best of my knowledge, the Arizona law does not mean law enforcment will be driving down the street rounding up brown-looking people who don’t have IDs on them. 

As many proponents of the Arizona law note, the law just reiterates federal law, as it is supposed to be enforced (but isn’t).  I’m no lawyer.  I don’t know. 

On the third hand, there are a lot of people who dont’ really care if you know the real truth or not.  To our nation’s media and current political elites, disinformation is just fine.  Christina Cordova at  “MNSpeak” is part of the disinformation, whether as a producer, a consumer, or both:

A new Arizona law makes it a state crime to be in the U.S. illegally, and requires local law enforcement to ask for papers from anyone they reasonably suspect is in the country illegally — in other words, anyone that “looks” like they “may” not be… a “white” American. Hmm…

If someone can show me the “racial dragnet” portion of this law, please speak up.

On the third-and-a-half hand, we all know that there are cops who will made their collars first and bother with “reasonable” this and “probable” that later, and pretty much assume that nobody’s got the money to fight City Hall anyway.  And that’s usually a fair bet; I know of not a few situations where the police have trampled over ostensible constitutional rights, knowing that the victims weren’t going to be able to do anything about it on their budgets anyway. 

On the fourth hand, that’s a separate issue.  The fact that some cops give ten miles per hour of leeway over the posted speed limit, and some give none at all, doesn’t invalidate the speed limit law.   We need to keep our cops accountable.

On the fifth hand, more enforcement is only part of the answer to the narcotraficante problem.  The “War On Drugs” is a failure by every possible moral, ethical and practical measure.  We need to end it.

On the sixth hand, until we do end it, we have to deal with the hand we’re dealt.  It’d be far better to keep illegal immigrants on the other side of the border.  Perhaps it’s time to abandon the farce of the “open, unfortified border”, and screw the whole idea of a “fence”, and move the Army down there.

On the seventh hand, barring a major commitment in fence-building or a major redeployment of the Armhy, our border is utterly permeable.  And cops in Arizona – and all along the border – are facing an awful situation.  It’s not just would-be landscapers and fry cooks coming across the border.  Once low-crime Phoenix is awash in narcotraficante crime these days.  Trafficers from across the border are causing all kinds of mayhem, and killing not a few innocent Americans who are in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And the feds are apparently doing nothing useful, and the mainstream media are pretending there is no story, largely because they ideologically support open borders.  Hey, news anchors need cheap nannies too.

On the eighth hand, the illegal immigration problem predates the drug war in Mexico by quite a bit.  The current drug war and the longstanding illegal immigration problem tie into the fact that Mexico is a failed, socialist state, while the US, so far, isn’t.  The open border has allowed Mexico’s failed socialist government to put off its day of reckoning with its own people.

On the ninth hand, to a big chunk of our nation’s political and media elite, the idea of separating ourselves from a neighbor’s failure – even for both country’s mutual good – is noxious.  America is guilty, they think, for much of the hemisphere’s dysfunction, one way or the other.  The whole “the world is one” conceit isn’t just idle talk to them.

And as part of exercising that conceit, there is an epic slander underway.  It’s of a piece with the slander of all dissent that our political aned media elites are engaged in, in which all dissent on any subject is called “racist”, “violent” and otherwise depraved. 

Part of that campaign is the deliberate blurring of the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants.  You will never see a lefty commentator, from Christina Cordova to Chris Coleman, use the word “illegal” immigrant when talking about the subject of the law; they never qualify the term “immigrant”, to the point of lying (Coleman’s little squib yesterday about the law affecting his sainted Irish grandmother, who would no doubt kick his ass if she saw the way he was torturing context; every good Irish Catholic gramma knows a lie by omission is a lie just the same).

On the tenth hand, I know of not one single conservative, anywhere, who actually favors clamping down on legal immigration.  “Build a high fence, and a wide gate”, most of us say. 

On the eleventh hand, the media would rather cover peckerwoods waving shotguns from the backs of their pickup trucks, a la “Reno 911″‘s classic “Minutemen” episode, than the actual facts.

So with eleven hands raised, where does that leave us?

Make sure the law is constitutional – as in, “actually follows the law”, as opposed to “makes my white-liberal-guilty heart droop”.

Josef Goebbels once gave us the biggest rule of PR, spinmongering, and the general art of getting the untrue accepted as truth; if you tell a big lie often enough, the stupid accept it as truth.

Are Cedar Rapids leftybloggers Sara and Brian Brandmeyer telling the big lie, or have they merely accepted it as truth?

He asks us to imagine if the Tea Parties were run by and mostly attended by black people:

So let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition.

If they were following the law, why would I care?  Skin color is (to me, at least) irrelevant; I have guns of my own.

And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government?

If those protesters – color irrelevant – were speaking from constitutional principal?  Why would I have a problem?  I share those principles.

If they were not,then – color irrelevant – I’d speak out against them.

It’s really fairly simple.

Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic?

If they – color irrelevent – were protesting in favor of constitutional principles I recognized?  I’d support ’em!

What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Right.  In the same way Thomas Jefferson once did.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired.

That’d be bad.  Of course, not a single “white” protester spat on Representatives Cleaver and Lewis; even they are backing away from the claim as fast as is politically prudent.

Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama.

Then I’d put Ted Nugent in a ring with Harry Belafonte, give them both machine guns, and make the whole world a better place.

The rest of the piece is, improbably, not even as good as the excerpt, and can be best answered as follows:

THE BRANDMEYERS:  “What if black people said things that bothered you?”

MITCH:  “I’d use my First-Amendment-fu to make them look like idiots”.

It’s how that “free society” thing is supposed to work.  I don’t know why some people find that so scary.

Never more than a degree behind the liberal fashion curve, Saint Paul mayor Chris Coleman ordered a boycott of city-funded travel to Arizona:

[Arizona’s new immigrtion law], “rooted in hate and fear,” sets a dangerous example, Coleman said.

“It will create a culture where racial profiling is acceptable and will create a dangerous wedge between police officers and the communities they serve,” Coleman said. “I can’t imagine what it would have been like for my grandmother had they passed a similar anti-Irish law.

But we can, Mayor Coleman – because your grandmother came here legally.  Just like my great-grandparents.

“Today I choose to stand with the millions of immigrants in our city and across the country who should have access to the same level of safety and opportunity as everyone else.”

Illegal immigrants?

Coleman said he would write to the Democratic and Republican national committees, urging them not to choose Phoenix as a site for national conventions in 2012.

If you care to help out Arizona companies who facing getting hit with financial losses because of the anti-sovereignty bigotry of a few well-heeled lefty governments, here’s a list of companies from Arizona.

Two conversations with a DFLer acquaintance of mine.

March, 2010:  “Well, of course I call them “teabaggers”.  Some of them sent bags of tea to Congresspeople!  Why, I have no idea whatever you could be taking offense at!   Honest!”

April, 2010:  “Did you hear that Rush Limbaugh calls the Administration “The Obama Regime?   Why, that’s not just insulting – that’s seditious!”

Philadelphia politician bags on rival for Democratic nomination by claiming he’s faking being gay:

Veteran Rep. Babette Josephs (D., Phila.) last Thursday accused her primary opponent, Gregg Kravitz, of pretending to be bisexual in order to pander to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender voters, a powerful bloc in the district.

“I outed him as a straight person,” Josephs said during a fund-raiser at the Black Sheep Pub & Restaurant, as some in the audience gasped or laughed, “and now he goes around telling people, quote, ‘I swing both ways.’ That’s quite a respectful way to talk about sexuality. This guy’s a gem.”

Kravitz and Josephs are duking it out for the Dem nomination to run for the Pennsylvania State House.   Thus the protected classes purity test.

Kravitz, 29, said that he is sexually attracted to both men and women and called Josephs’ comments offensive.

“That kind of taunting is going to make it more difficult for closeted members of the LGBT community to be comfortable with themselves,” Kravitz said. “It’s damaging.”

But others said the remarkable quarrel itself was a sign of progress.

“We’ve hit a new high point when candidates are accused of pretending to be gay to win a seat,” said Mark Segal, publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News and a pioneering civil rights advocate.

It’s nothing new, of course; Bill Clinton pretended to be black, and Joe Biden pretends to be handicapped.

Last April 15, I was walking around the Capitol grounds during the first Tax Day Tea Party.  There were thousands of people there.  The imponderably vast majority were just plain workadaddy, huggamommy Minnesotans who were upset about the Administration’s gargantuan mortgaging of our great-grandchildrens’ futures – people like me and, I suspect, most of you.

But as I wandered about, pondering what I was going to write about the event, I noticed a few people who I’d charitably call “fringe”.  Including a few people with some anti-immigration signs that I could accurately call “groaningly racist”.

And I thought…:

1. “Great; a dozen people out of 5,000 look like racist buffoons; you know who will get all the news coverage, don’t you?”
2. “I’ll write about the Tea Party, and some leftyblogging wannabee moral watchdog will post one of those pictures, with post that says “Mitch Berg supports anti-hispanic racism”.

Declaring guilt by association – often the faintest, most tendentious assocation possible – is an oldie but goodie among those who’ve been 86ed from the marketplace of ideas.  We saw this in the Twin Cities last year when local leftyblogger Jeff Fecke smeared Kevin Ecker and, by extension, all True North writers, for writing approvingly about a story about an anti-immigration activist who, it turned out much later, was also a neo-nazi.

The point?  Guilt by very tenuous, context-free association is stupid.

And after a year of eating their lunch, it’s perhaps inevitable that James O’Keefe, of the classic ACORN “Pimp” stings, is on the receiving end, this time in a hit piece by Max Blumenthal at Salon.

The first part; set it up so that everyone you disagree with is in the same boat as your victim:

Many of the conservatives who gleefully promoted James O’Keefe’s past political stunts are feigning shock at his arrest on charges that he and three associates planned to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pundits hailed the 25-year-old O’Keefe as a creative genius and model of journalistic ethics. Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O’Keefe, called him one of the all-time “great journalists” and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his undercover ACORN video. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly declared he should have earned a “congressional medal.”

Now, the whamma-jamma charge:

His right-wing admirers don’t seem to mind that O’Keefe’s short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O’Keefe at a 2006 conference on “Race and Conservatism” that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30  on the Web site of the anti-racism group One People’s Project, shows O’Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership Institute, which employed O’Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. But O’Keefe and fellow young conservative provocateur Marcus Epstein soldiered on to give anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP.

Wow. 

That’s a pretty serious charge, if it’s true.

Of course, it’s not.

How do we know?   Onward:

According to One People’s Project founder Daryle Jenkins, O’Keefe was manning the literature table at the gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism. OPP covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Jenkins told me the table was filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and the Occidental Quarterly.  The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. “We can say for certain that James O’Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that,” Jenkins said. O’Keefe’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client’s role in the conference.

But they responded to Larry O’Connor, at Breitbart’s Big Journalism.  Who notes:

We would think that Mr. Blumenthal at Salon or Stephen Thrasher at the Village Voice, as responsible reporters, might have called Mr. O’Keefe to get his response to the allegations made in an obscure blog.  But no.  Instead they ran the story and (in the case of the Voice) actually added new and juicy lies to the myth.

Well, here at Big Journalism we think it’s a good idea to actually seek the truth.

So we spoke with James O’Keefe today.  This is what he tells us:

1. He was not “manning a table” at the event
2. He was not involved with the organization or operations of the event.
3. He attended the event with many of his Leadership Institute co-workers since it was right across the street from their building in Arlington, Va., and it was organized by other LI associates.
4. The organizer who is being called a “White Supremacist” is half Jewish and half Korean.
5. One of the panelist was an African-American named Kevin Martin.
6. The event was forced to move to a Georgetown University building in Arlington, not at a cross-burning.

We know all this because we called Mr. O’Keefe and asked him.  Which is more than other media outlets have done.

And, to be fair, more than any lefty does when “reporting” on this sort of defamatory character assassination.

We also spoke with Daryle Jenkins of One People’s Project, the man who started this entire legend.  We asked if he had a photograph that actually showed O’Keefe “manning the table” as has been reported, and he said that this cropped photo was all they had.  His claim that Mr. O’Keefe “manned” the table of literature is based on eye-witnesses who were at the event…

…Mr. Jenkins only produced the name of one witness:  David Weigel who, at the time was a reporter with Reason Magazine. 

Weigel is a noted lefty alt-journalist and, as noted in this blog, among the better among the species.

We called Mr. Weigel and he denied ever telling Mr. Jenkins that Mr. O’Keefe was “manning the table.” Indeed, he has already gone on record denying he said that.

So let’s reset:

Here is the story they actually have:

James O’Keefe attended a forum years ago that dealt with race and politics.  The forum was located at a Georgetown University building (that’s right, a 21-year-old man attended an event on a college campus).  The forum had as one of its three speakers a controversial figure, Jared Taylor, with a track record of making racist statements.  He was being debated by two other people including Mr. Martin (taking issue with the racist figure).  Mr. Taylor has also appeared with Phil Donohue, Queen Latifa and Paula Zahn on their TV shows to debate race.  Are the audience members of the Donohue show racist for sitting and watching that debate?

Honestly, that isn’t much of a story.  But… you put Mr. O’Keefe at a table full of racist literature and you say that he was manning the table.  And you say you have a picture proving it.  And you make it sound like he was one of the organizers of this event.  And you call the event a “White Supremacist Conference”.  Well… now you’ve got a story.

Only problem:  It’s all a lie.

And when it comes to lefty character assassination – the only weapon they have against an activist who’s spent the last year eating their lunch in front of them – that’s the best they can do.

Let’s go back to Blumenthal’s piece, and see if we can pick out the code words and manglings of context:

O’Keefe’s racial issues can be seen in many of his prior stunts, of course. The notorious ACORN videos highlighted images of himself dressed as a pimp, deceptively edited through hidden camera footage as he baited African-American office workers into making statements that could be perceived as incriminating.

“Baited African-American office workers”.  So is Blumenthal suggesting O’Keefe avoided baiting white ACORN sleazeballs?  Or is he just trying to create a sense of phony victimhood?

There were also lesser-known but equally inflammatory  spectacles like the “affirmative action bake sale” O’Keefe and his conservative comrades held when they were students at Rutgers University.

 During the event, O’Keefe stood at a table in the center of campus offering baked goods at reduced prices to Latinos and African-Americans while whites were forced to pay exorbitant amounts. (Native Americans, he announced, would eat free.)

In other words, it satirized the insulting, demeaning aspects of affirmative action – the sort of thing that, if done by politically-correct “performance artists” to conservatives would get an NEA grant.

Next, Blumenthal digs back age…18?

By O’Keefe’s own account, his racial troubles became acute when he entered the multicultural atmosphere of Rutgers University’s dormitory system. In an online diary that has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not before being captured on Daily Kos), he wrote that he was forced to live on an all-black dormitory floor after refusing to live with the gay roommate he was initially assigned. O’Keefe claimed his next roommate was “an Indian midget … who smelled like shit.” The roommate left, however, and was replaced by “a greek kid.”

Stop the presses; a teenager saying something stupid. 

Or, should I say, maybe saying somethign stupid, since even Blumenthal’s carefully-cropped context gives itself reasonable doubt:

 The new roommate complained to a residential administrator that O’Keefe had called his neighbors “niggers,” prompting the school to expel him from the dorm. He rejected the accusation as a “complete lie,” writing, “I was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and my situation, no friends, no one one [sic] to talk to, forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tolbert, to defend myself and help explain that I did not call anyone any names.”

So – was O’Keefe a hardened 18 year old racist, or a wet-behind-the-ears teenager caught up in a bigoted setup, or something in between? 

We can’t answer the question – but Blumenthal did, anyway.

The following year, despite this record, O’Keefe secured a dream job in the conservative movement, employed by the Leadership Institute, a Northern Virginia-based outfit that serves as the movement’s most prolific youth training operation. There, O’Keefe met Marcus Epstein, a fellow ideologue who as editor of a conservative publication at the College of William and Mary assailed Martin Luther King Jr. for “philandering and plagiarism” and challenged his patriotism and Christianity.

Catch that?  Martin Luther King must not be questioned in any way.  In other words, in Max Blumenthal’s special little world, Political Incorrectness equals racism.

Together, O’Keefe and Epstein planned an event in August 2006 that would wed their extreme views on race with their ambitions. Epstein invited white nationalist  Jared Taylor [see above] and homophobic white-grievance peddler John Derbyshire of the National Review

Um, huh? 

Again – asking politically-incorrect questions is racism?

According to a post on the white supremacist Web site Stormfront, Taylor and Derbyshire debate “the role of race in policy decisions and the racial future of the Republican party.”

And here Blumenthal has descended into pure fantasy.  Republicans are constantly discussing, debating and arguing about racial issues; “how do we get blacks, hispanics and asians, who all should be Republicans due to their interest in, respectively, eduation reform, social conservatism and free markets. 

So what was said at the debate?  Blumenthal doesn’t trouble himself to tell the reader.  Indeed, the only “racist” act in the story seems to be the fact that the story was reported in Stormfront, which is certainly a racist site.   But what did they say?

After I go and ridicule Arlen Specter for demanding that Michele Bachmann stay barefoot and pregnant with all the other good wimmins, I’m chagrinned to note that, according to my betters at the LATimes, Specter was a victim.

Michele Bachmann’s blabbing drives Arlen Specter to patronize

“If she hadn’t been all uppity and talking, my inner sexist would have stayed tucked carefully away”.

My apologies.  Sincerely.

Some posts practically write themselves.

Jennifer “J-Lo” Lopez, on the fairly unforgiveable “Lopez Tonight” show, calls Sarah Palin a naughty name:

The controversy sprang from her use of a particular word to describe Sarah Palin. She calls Sarah Palin ‘la carbona,’ a Spanish word which means bitch.

J-Lo calling Palin a “crazy bitch”?

Um…

…yeah.